Tuesday, 1 May 2012

Ghostsdo wear sheets but not for sleeping. Sometimes people die while still aliveand then come back to lifeonly partially. You can read the signsaroundthe eyes, which geta dustylook like burned out hundred watt bulbs.When theypass one another on the streetsthere is a soft noise, as of muslin touching.

The Christoph Michels photo is just amazing and I love the poem also and its title. I don't know. I'm trying hard these days (without much success I'm afraid) to go easier on the living dead; I guess I don't want to become one of them and I'm afraid my uncharitable thoughts will bounce back at me. As for the actual (some dearly, some strangers) departed, in my experience they flash by suddenly. I can't be quite sure what they're wearing, but they leave an impression like the Michels photo and a sound not unlike muslin touching. Curtis

Chris, it seems you read that photo in something like the way I do. Though perhaps it goes to the duck/rabbit quick of things to admit that there is someone here who denies the possibility of that reading altogether.

Gamefaced, that means a lot.

Curtis, know what you mean.

These past 28 days I have felt entirely in the dark about practically everything, as if wakewalking through a sort of nimbus. This is perhaps post-concussion syndrome talking.

Have begun to venture out timorously and haltingly in mid o'night, when the atmospherics are not dissimilar to those in the two TH shots.

But it would always be and indeed now is good to feel other ghosts are/were out there in the oblique muslin night -- to hear passing, be in touch & c.

Robb, Gamefaced, Colin, thank you for the company, particularly welcome on a night when the vaunted recovery seems to have slipped a cog and lapsed back to Go, or perhaps somewhere prior even to that.

I don't know what it is causes humans to think that merely making the earnest struggle to continue is going to persuade the fates to let that happen. Sheer denseness probably. There are no rose gardens in the desert of the fates.

Traffic speeding to and from the freeway (speaking of fates) whooshes past out front nonstop at this moment, as it does forever; and the discharging head wound from my brilliant disaster is telling me to go look for a nice soft muslin winding-sheet, wrap up in it, and lie down among the warm cats.

The streets ought to be reserved for ghosts, and kept off limits to machines, in my humble if doubtless tiresomely-reiterated view.

A search for "Ed Dorn chickens" led me here, thanks to a wonderful story that you (or possibly David, or maybe both) used to tell about Ed saying that you need to get to the bottom of one thing and then you can get to the bottom of everything.

I think fondly of you, every night of this benighted life, as I confer mutely with the small red clay man you fashioned for me, lo these many dcades past.

His head and arms have fallen off, every now and then, due surely to the sheer weight of gravity and time passing.

Those are things one can without much difficulty understand.

But I super-glue the amputated bits back on, and the cheerful little fellow remains none the wiser, if a wee bit the worse for wear.

And of which of us cannot this be said.

(Though not to bear down too hard on that equation, as I hope you were not recently run over by a speeding car. That unfortunate event required the emergency activation of all the king's left-over super-glue at the county trauma center. And what did I most wish for, in those dire straits, there on the post-surgical gurney? The little red clay man, talisman of the perdurable strength of the blissfully inanimate!)